O'FALLON, Illinois — More than a week ago, Jen Emig's mission was to quickly visit the emergency room because her dad was in pain. The Mascoutah resident showed up at HSHS St. Elizabeth's Hospital in O'Fallon, Illinois, on Saturday evening.
"Everything was fine, then Sunday the systems went down. My dad went to surgery on Sunday," Emig said.
Little did she know, she'd walked into another crisis.
Within 24 hours of being inside the hospital, a systemwide outage crippled the HSHS hospital system on Aug. 27.
Three local hospitals affected by the HSHS outage include:
- HSHS St. Joseph's Breese, in Breese, Illinois.
- HSHS St. Joseph's Highland, in Highland, Illinois.
- HSHS Holy Family Hospital, in Greenville, Illinois.
Emig was one of the thousands who felt the impact.
"They did a CT scan and admitted they were unable to pull anything prior to the outage and he had another post surgery CT scan and they couldn’t compare the images. Everything is slower because everyone is reading paper," Emig said. "I felt like things weren’t moving fast enough."
Emig said her father stayed in the hospital for a week. He was released after being pain-free for 48 hours.
But the pain started again and the family decided to admit him into Barnes-Jewish Hospital right before the Labor Day holiday.
"He did not want to go back to St. Elizabeth's. We had some fabulous doctors but you can’t overlook that efficiency to compare things, compare images and look at previous history," Emig said.
5 On Your Side asked for multiple updates from HSHS. Its team referred us to their website for details.
The latest video message was Friday from CEO and President Damond Boatwright.
"We can confirm this was a result of a cyber security incident. The impact is ongoing," Boatwright said.
Boatwright said they were receiving assistance from third-party experts and law enforcement. As of Monday afternoon, they were making progress to fix the outage.
The incident impacted clinical operations and communications systems.
Emig said she believes the outage slowed everything down. In a situation where every second counts, she said she only wants things to improve.
"As good as you are medically and professionally, I just don’t think you can deny not having computers isn’t impacting the care. I feel like the outage has lasted too long. It’s kind of unacceptable," Emig added.
There is no update on when the system will be restored.
HSHS St. Elizabeth's Hospital provided a statement in the Facebook post below:
"We have received reports that people are receiving email, text and phone calls claiming to be HSHS representatives seeking payment for services. At this time, we are not collecting payments from any patients for outstanding bills. We will notify you when billing processes are back up and running. Please do not respond to these types of messages. We ask that you save them so that we can track and investigate the source. Forward the information to spam@hshs.org."
HSHS St. Elizabeth's Hospital in O'Fallon, Illinois, announced it closed its Convenient Care.
"St. Elizabeth's Emergency Department is always open for your emergency needs," a Facebook post stated, adding that anyone experiencing chest pains or major trauma shouldn't delay care and should immediately call 911.
The hospital system said it has posted further information on hshsupdates.org.